The term “Web 2.0” describes a changing trend in the use of Internet technology (e.g., the World Wide Web), such as within the area of web design. Accordingly, the intent of a Web 2.0 application may generally be to enhance creativity and communications through securely sharing information, thereby improving the collaboration and functionality of the World Wide Web. Various Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and continuous evolution of specific web communities and hosted services, such as, for example, social-networking sites, video hosting/sharing sites, “wiki” pages, and user blogs. Although the term implies a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update of any technical specifications, but rather to changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web.
Within the area of web design, a markup language may be described as an artificial language using a set of annotations to text that give instructions regarding the structure of text or how it is to be displayed. Extensible Markup Language (“XML”) is a general-purpose specification for creating custom “meta” markup languages. XML is classified as an extensible language, since it allows the user to define the mark-up elements. In other words, as a meta-language, users of XML may create an extensible set of tags, as needed, and then describe those tags and their permitted uses. Accordingly, the purpose of XML is to aid information systems in sharing structured data, such as the Internet. Furthermore, XML allows users to encode documents and to serialize data. An XML Schema Definition (“XSD”) may be described as a type of XML document, wherein the XSD is typically expressed in terms of constraints on the structure and content of documents of that type. These constraints are more strenuous than the basic syntactical constraints imposed by XML itself. Thus, an XML schema provides a view of the document type at a relatively high level of abstraction.
Web Services Description Language (“WSDL”) is an XML-based language that provides a model for describing network services. Specifically, WSDL may describe network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing information such as document-oriented data or procedure-oriented data. The operations and messages are described abstractly and then bound to a concrete network protocol and message format in order to define an endpoint. The endpoint, or port, may be defined by associating a network address with a reusable binding, and a collection of ports may define a service. The abstract definition of ports and messages are separated from their concrete use or instance, allowing the reuse of these definitions. Accordingly, messages are abstract descriptions of the data being exchanged, and port types are abstract collections of supported operations. The concrete protocol and data format specifications for a particular port type may constitute a reusable binding, whereas the operations and messages may then bound to a concrete network protocol and message format to define an endpoint. In this way, WSDL is extensible to allow description of endpoints and their messages regardless of what message formats or network protocols are used to communicate.